The feds might also be working under the impression that any profits the university makes off its patents will reduce the tax subsidies that the university needs, thus benefiting the public.
Does it work out that way? Tuition seems to be rising faster as universities get more aggressive about patenting things. It seems to me that, as universities have started trying to act more like for-profit companies, things have been getting worse.
You make sensible points. The only one I can really object to is the first. Sure, 98% of your ideas are going to be crap. But given the state of patent law, a substantial portion of them might be patentable crap.
While there may not be significant risk from having a five minute discussion with your professor over an idea, something more substantial (like a class project) does carry risk. I think that when students believe they have to choose between exploring an idea and being able to profit from the idea, it will wreak merry havoc with the flow of ideas in a university setting. I also think that the free flow of ideas is the absolute most important societal function of a university.
Universities need to be as generous as possible towards their idea monkeys. Otherwise, their most creative and ambitious minds will start hoarding their ideas, and dropping out of the university (probably taking other creative minds with them) in order to maintain ownership.
I always found that the best lectures and discussions were the ones where, having been introduced to a new idea, people started coming up with possible applications for it, or suggesting modifications that might give better results. Okay, most of them were crap, for we were lowly undergrads. But apparently, what we should have been doing, instead of blurting out things like, "Could this technique be used to clean up the audio in sound files?" and having the lecturer explain why that probably wasn't workable, we should have just written a quick "PATENT THIS" next to every dumb idea, then wait until we graduated to find out whether it was a good idea.
Imagine taking this attitude into your university-sponsored research projects. Every time you had a radical insight into why your team's approach wasn't working, you wouldn't send the team an e-mail. You'd document it in your personal files, wait for the project to crash and burn, then follow up after you graduated. Presumably, everyone else would be doing the same.
Then, once you became a professor, rather than telling your students, "Wow, that's an interesting approach, and I strongly encourage you to investigate it," you patiently explain to the student why it's a stupid idea, and he never would have suggested it if he really understood the coursework. If you're worth your professorial stipend, you should be able to come up with enough windbaggery to make it stick, and leave the student demoralized. Then, write a quick "PATENT THIS" in your notes.
If the student continues coming up with good ideas, convince him to drop out and join your idea lab, where you've already got a dozen bright, eager young folks slaving away, coming up with patents and products. It's not as though the Uni has a lot of specialized CS gear that you need to research things properly. You'd arrange your business relationship with these dropouts in whatever way gave it a veneer of legality.
To me, this sorry state of affairs seems like the logical result of a system where students are locked out of the profits generated by their own ideas. The university in this story ought to grant this student a license to his own invention, for $1.
No. The situation is dire enough that failure could mean a collapse of the ecological underpinnings of our civilization, and a commensurate reduction in the ability of the planet to keep us in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. Throwing away all but the cheapest options is akin to asking, "Isn't that a much to be paying for lifeboats?" while the ship is going down!
If our goal is to maximize the future value of our economy, and there is a potential threat out there that could diminish that future value by, say, 50%*, it's worth committing a huge fraction of our wealth to averting it, even if the threat is an uncertain one. Quibbling over a couple of percent today is lunacy.
* That's more akin to a severe depression, not the OMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE (which I haven't ruled out). If you consider civilizational collapse a real possibility, then you have to spend as though the entire future output of the economy is at stake.
2) I mean, we at least know not to release more kudzu. That's gotta count for something.
3) You clearly haven't read up on "global warming in its wildest forms." Read "Under a Green Sky." Or just its Amazon reviews, if you're busy. That should give you the flavor of the true disaster scenarios.
In other words, despite our admitted incompetence, we might still have to do some reckless geoengineering, for the same reason that they test out highly experimental medicines on patients with terminal illnesses.
Please document where these proposals were made by serious climate researchers, rather than by Popular Mechanics. Further document that these were serious proposals, rather than "wouldn't-it-be-cool-ifs" of the space elevator variety.*
Enough of the "Scientists predicted global cooling" myth. Even in the days when this belief was supposedly at its peak, the number of papers predicting warming outpaced the number of papers predicting cooling by 6 to 1. The cooling papers were generally ones that predicted a continued rise in atmospheric soot, not sudden onset ice ages.
In other words, your entire post (and by extension, your entire understanding of climate change) rests on a fraudulent foundation.
* Space elevator chatter of the 1970s, I mean. Not the real, legitimate space elevators that we're sure they'll be putting up any day now and it would cost less than a month in Iraq and here's a link to another breakthrough in carbon nanotube production. I'm really not looking to argue over that.
If the point of the Orbital Carbon Observer was to discover what you seem to think it's trying to discover, it would be a complete waste of money. We already know that the sources you want to verify are the cause of increased atmospheric CO2. We know this because we know that the carbon isotope ratio is very different when you compare carbon from the ground to carbon actively involved in the carbon cycle. As we take carbon from the ground and put it into the atmosphere, the ratio of C-14 is lowered, and in about the amounts we would expect.
The excess carbon from the atmosphere came from hydrocarbons in the ground. There isn't much room for honest disagreement on that.
The Observer is less interested in where the CO2 is coming from. That's a solved problem. We want to know where it's going. Specifically, we want to know why the hell we can pump eight gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, and the atmospheric concentrations respond as though we only pumped out six gigatons. We need to know where those extra two gigatons are going, primarily because we need to know how long the biosphere will keep taking up our slack. If this beneficial behavior drops off too fast and too soon, it will lead to greatly accelerated global warming.
While you may not be able to conserve your way to prosperity, you can certainly spend spend spend your way to the poorhouse. Which is exactly what we've been doing with all the natural resources that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution. We're burning through them at a prodigious rate, and only now are we starting to think about how we'll replace that income stream once it's gone. If you're looking for threats to your kids' futures, there's the place to start.
Your fear of conservation seems to be predicated upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the world. It isn't CO2 emissions -- or even energy consumption -- that makes people happy and prosperous. It's what that CO2 and energy are expended in pursuit of that matters. Our fuel efficiency standards (weak and unambitious as they are) haven't just reduced the amount of CO2 we've released, they've also added hundreds of billions of dollars to our economy every single year, because they reduced our demand for oil by billions of barrels each year. Conservation can be great for the economy. This is so true, that some studies have estimated that, if we take all the CO2 reductions that pay out money, and use those gains to pay for the CO2 reductions that lose money, we could meet ambitious targets without net expenditures.
Lastly, given the alternatives you propose, I don't think you're really grasping the notion of cap-and-trade or carbon tax systems. You're proposing that we have government make big, sloppy, error-prone decisions, like adding entire countries to the "import less" column, only to take them off a couple of years later. With a carbon tax, the amount of carbon embodied in any given good or service is simply embedded into its sale price. It took X gallons of gas to provide, and the inputs were therefore taxed at X * rate. Anyone who can provide a similar service with less carbon inputs will have a competitive advantage.
But I like cap-and-trade better. Let the market stumble onto the cheapest, most desirable way to wring unnecessary carbon out of the system. Right now, the market is almost entirely blind to CO2 emissions, to our great detriment. When we implemented the same sort of system for sulfur dioxide, industry claimed that the auction prices would bankrupt them. They swore to Congress that it would cost hundreds of dollars to remove a ton of the stuff from the atmosphere. But when they were overruled, and SO2 permits were auctioned, the actual price turned out to be around $15/ton. Most of the potential buyers found that, even at that low price, it was cheaper to just install scrubbers. The regulation found the true price of SO2 almost immediately, and found that it was cheap. Trading CO2 in a similar manner will show us how much it really costs to red
I think you're missing the point. Ten years ago, taking this sort of survey would likely have resulted in a 10 to 1 landslide for "Huh? You're joking, right?"
I was going to write a longish post detailing why 1) fast change itself is bad, and 2) slowing down the rate at which we alter the climate is hardly a matter of privileging or idealizing any given prior state.
Then I noticed that I was responding to you. So forget I said any of that, so I can leave you with these two words of wisdom.
Re: Ice. Yeah, so the melting isn't a perfectly smooth downward trend. In 2008, the minimum ice coverage for the melting season was 4.67M square kilometers, and the year before, it was 4.28M. That doesn't negate the overall trend. In actuality, the next lowest year wasn't 2006, but 2005. In 2006, there was a slight recovery as well.
It's pretty dishonest for sites like NewsBusters and FreeRepublic to be trumpeting a half-million km^2 gain, without pointing out the previous year saw a loss of about 1.2M km^2. They also forgot to mention that the ice-shrinking trend has been statistically significant over the past fifty years of fluctuating year-over-year levels. They also won't tell you that the people who produced the data think that ice volume (as opposed to ice area) is down from last year.
One. Year. Means. Jack.
That goes double for "global warming peaked in 1998." Look at the graph, and notice a couple of things. First, notice that 1998 was a really, really, really weird year. I defy you to find another year on the graph as far above the five year average (though a couple from the 1880s are in the running). 1998 was an El Nino-injected monster of a year, and it's utterly dishonest for anyone to use it as a baseline.
The next thing to note: the sheer amount of noise in the graph. Even the five year averages are full of dips and surges. The progression is anything but steady, yet the overall trend is clear. Individual years? They're all over the map. The record is littered with unusually low years that, in the end, didn't amount to anything significant.
The last thing to note: Even accounting for the fact that 1998 is pulling up the five year average towards the end of the blue line, every single year from 2001 on matched or exceeded that five year average. 2008 isn't on the chart yet, and when it is, it will be somewhat below the average for this decade. But climate scientists aren't sweating.*
Re: computer models. I don't know what you're talking about, and I'm starting to suspect that you don't either.
Watching climate contrarians spin is like watching a compulsive gambler. Sure, you made $1800 that last hand, but if you were thinking clearly you'd notice that you were still down twenty grand for the night. Don't let one offbeat year fool you. The averages are what matter.
* They mention that this year did include a La Nina event, which tends to drop temperatures.
I've had good experiences so far in the non-profit sector. It really is all about community building, and all the nifty gadgetry out there has huge potential. Unfortunately, the nonprofits I've seen are constrained by limited technology. My workplace mostly uses ancient Mac G3s because, way back in the day, somebody donated a bunch of G3s to our parent organization. We've been a Mac shop ever since.
The point is, the non-profit sector has its ups and downs. The downside is, you'll probably be the most techy person in the organization, so there's nobody to teach you the ropes or bail you out when things go wrong. But you also have a freedom of action that wouldn't be possible as a junior coder sharing six million lines of code with seventy other developers, sixty-nine of whom have tenure over you.
Let me reiterate davecrusoe's point: There are lots of organizations that are starved for CS talent, who can't always pay industry average, but will just about let you write your own job description. I like it much better than being just another henchman.
>> I've been interviewing candidates for the last 15 years and "computer science" is a joke. The universities are teaching a trade, not a science.
>> Kids barely understand the mathematical basics of how a hash table works.
Yeah, I never got this. My professor kept trying to explain it using this short order cook metaphor, and I spent the whole lecture thinking about hash browns. If I'd only known to eat my sandwich before class, I might be qualified to work at your company.
>> Don't even get me started on twos-compliment arithmetic
Two, you are lookin' fine tonight! Your serifs really highlight your kerning. And that perfume... Helvetica? Naughty!
>> or how to evaluate algorithms.
The proper way to evaluate an algorithm is to put a description of it up on your blog and see how many diggs it gets.
The more computationally intensive alternative is to put it on Wikipedia, check back in a week, and implement the result. Unfortunately that approach runs O(n * log(m) * 2^q)*, and is therefore to be avoided.
* n - length of the description, m - number of edits, q - how many degrees of separation there are between you and Jimbo Wales.
I don't know. If I had a brilliant idea, that would lead to a revolutionary product, then I told Google about it and they made millions and I got nothing, I'd be a bit hurt.
On the other hand, I'd get to use that nifty product that I'd been dreaming of. Admit it, that would be pretty nifty.
Adjusted for inflation, the cost of WWII was about 5 trillion dollars.
The Iraq war has already cost nearly 600B, with some estimates of the eventual costs being upwards of 3 trillion.
The best estimate I've found of bailout spending claims that 2.7T has been spent. But that does include a lot of collateralized loans, equity stake purchases, etc., so the taxpayers may be able to recoup quite a bit of it.
I'm not convinced that the bailout is being handled properly, or that it's having the positive effect that it's supposed to. But I don't see how any of this constitutes "demand side economics." Not even the $168B in economic stimulus, which mostly got given to the wealthy and middle class, and then went to paying off existing debt, not increase consumer demand.
Had there been a real increase in private spending, it would have eased our economic troubles some. I think it's okay to give public spending a shot. At least that way, we know that it will lead to new demand.
Keynesian economics worked well in WWII*. Trillions of dollars in artificial demand, mostly spent on things which had little or no post-war use (as opposed to good infrastructure spending), and the deaths of over 400,000 of our future workforce, and somehow all that waste led to impressive post-war prosperity.
Imagine if the same sort of heroic spending was undertaken in the pursuit of new infrastructure, health and education initiatives, ecological restoration, alternative energy research, and the like. That is, spending on things that will provide for our needs in the future, rather than munitions**.
* It hadn't been properly tried during the Great Depression, though even the limited attempts by the New Deal met with success, until 1938 when Roosevelt listened to detractors, cut spending to reduce the deficit, and crashed the economy for a while.
** As someone wittier than me explained, bombs are economically strange things. Rather than producing goods and services, they destroy what is already made. Worse, they are delivered at no small expense to people who do not want them.
I'll see your sig, and raise you a "then you're a hypocritical bastard":
"When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.
The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high.
To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, 'you give and you give'" (Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001, p. 221).
You claim that nobody lives for you. Tell that to the guy who made way less than minimum wage picking the fruit you eat, or the woman who cleans your office, or the guy who bags your groceries, or the sweatshop worker who made your shirt. Each of them makes a tiny contribution to your own happiness, success, and comfort, and each is rewarded with a lifestyle that ranges from boring and degrading to borderline slavery. You take their contributions without hesitation or thought, while whining and sniveling about how unfair it is that you should be asked to give back in a small measure.
If that isn't asking somebody else to live for you, then what is?
It's very lazy or stupid of you to assume that the poor are poor because they are lazy or stupid.
It's also lazy or stupid of you to attribute these fishy statistics to the New York Times. What you linked to was actually a book excerpt that the Times merely reprinted. They would be more appropriately attributed thusly: According to "The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of American's Wealthy" authors Thomas J. Stanley, Ph.D and William D. Danko Ph.D...
But two random doctorates who wrote a book congratulating millionaires for being millionaires just doesn't have the same ring of progressive credibility as "according to the New York Times," does it?
Regardless of the statistics you cite (which are cherry-picked, and may or may not be properly collected), it doesn't change the fact that sociologists cannot find a better predictor of a person's socioeconomic future than their parents' socioeconomic background. It's a stronger predictor than race, gender, IQ, or scholastic achievement (individual or parental).
It's also true that the highest performing children of poor people graduate from college at approximately the same rate as the lowest-performing children of the wealthy. I don't remember exactly how the statistics broke down, but it was something like being in the most talented 20% of all children in the lowest income quartile gave you about the same graduation rate as being in the least talented 20% of children in the highest income quartile.
Being the idiot child of a rich person is a more secure route to success than being a bright and talented child of a poor person. In such a society, chalking your own success up to hard work and everyone else's failures up to stupidity is a cruel and narcissistic sort of stupidity.
The weight of a flywheel is far less important than the weight. Energy of motion is a product of mass times velocity squared, so doubling the rate of rotation quadruples the amount of energy stored. The ideal for many applications is to find a material that is very light, but won't fly apart at high speeds. I remember reading about somebody trying something with carbon nanofibers, but that was a long while back.
The weight doesn't matter much for energy seepage either. A good flywheel will be suspended by magnets, so regardless of the weight, the friction due to weight is effectively zero. There is still air friction and electrical losses to deal with.
Getting energy into them isn't a huge obstacle either. I've scoured the web, and it looks like the people actually selling flywheels-as-UPS solutions are claiming 90% efficiency.
Something may be missing in my understanding here. The article claims that the battery backup for the wind farm costs about three million dollars per MWH, whereas the flywheel backup system I'm looking at right now claims that it can give you about 200kWH capacity for about $50,000. That's $250k per MWH installed, and very low maintenance costs.
Their claims could be overblown, or I could have my math wrong, or there is something I'm missing that makes the flywheels unsuitable for this application. There might also be a huge economic opportunity, but somehow I doubt it.
I did some calculations (yay!), and came up with the following: Raising the Empire State Building (365,000 tons of material) to the height of one meter would store a little shy of a megawatt hour of energy.
I'm imagining this weird future city where the buildings slowly rose and fell as energy was stored and withdrawn. It's a cool thought, but it seems that the engineering difficulties would be considerable, and the payoff not so much.
A system where water was stored at the top of a skyscraper might be more feasible (putting the weight a hundred times higher means you only need 1% of the material. You might be able to do something with water, or a block on a chain. But the storage payoff seems relatively small.
It might make more sense to deal with material that's already being lifted up and dropped down. Like integrating some sort of storage and release system for the water already being pumped to the top of skyscrapers. Given separate reservoirs for potable water and sewage, and some leeway about when to pump water in and release waste out, something might be arranged.
The calculation: 365000 tons * 907 kg/ton * 10 joules/kg * 1kWH / 3,600,000 joules. The 365000 tons figure is from this kid's site.
By the same reasoning, if it had been in Countrywide's best interests to have tighter mortgage standards, they would have implemented them on their own. If it had been in Morgan Stanley's best interest to investigate what they were really buying with those credit default swap dollars, then they would have. No need for the government to demand transparency. The private markets will demand exactly as much transparency as they need.
We saw how those worked out.
We saw how something else worked out as well. The last time we dared demand higher fuel efficiency from the automakers, they promised carnage on the highways and blood on their balance sheets. In fact, they adjusted to the regulations with minimal disruption, regulations which save the broader economy about $100B a year in reduced fuel demand.
We could bail out the auto industry a thousand times over for that kind of cash.
If you want to judge vehicles by their maximum occupancy, rather than by the number of people they ordinarily carry. I don't see any problem with that. Makes perfect sense. Also, we should put every driver behind the wheel of a schoolbus. Our dependency on foreign oil will melt away.
If you're going to trot out this right-wing shtick, could you at least trot out higher-quality right-wing shtick?
1) China already has higher mileage standards than the American fleet will by 2020?
2) By 2010, Japan will have higher mileage standards than the American fleet will by 2020?
3) By 2012, the EU will have efficiency standards 12MPG higher than American cars?
Even if America were to eliminate fuel standards, it wouldn't change the standards they would have to uphold in order to sell to foreign markets. Plus, foreign car makers selling here have to uphold our standards or better.
Interesting that you, "as an engineer", think that government meddling is the whole of Detroit's problems, but when listing specific legislation you could only come up with one, which applies equally to Detroit's competitors, and where the imposed standards are actually lower than those imposed by most other markets on their own fleets.
It's also interesting that you "as an engineer" think that it's easier to relocate oil production than auto manufacturing. Maybe we would be better off if the oil industry snuck off, and took Texas and Alaska with them.
1) Which is better for the economy: government spending that keeps people gainfully employed, at the expense of a small amount of incentive for those who already can afford to never work another day in their lives? Or letting tens of millions of people stand idle?
Really? Wow. I didn't think you'd pick that one.
2) "Where the commuter wants to go" is mostly a product of local government decisions. They make the fundamental decisions about how land is zoned. Arguably, rail works so poorly in the U.S. in part due to planning boards that bought into the 'everyone has a car' conventional wisdom.
3) Short of smuggling a nuke onto the train, I don't see how terrorists could engineer anything like another September 11. They would be hard pressed to kill a majority of the passengers.
5) See 2. Rail has the same problem as roads in this regard. You slap down the line, expecting it to last decades, without being sure that it's in the right place. On the other hand, once a road is laid down, people start using it, and destinations start cropping up to take advantage of the traffic, in a self-perpetuating cycle.
6) Americans want the freedom to go where they want, in a convenient manner. You'd be hard-pressed to say that this desire is uniquely American, or that it's a feeling not shared by transit-taking Europeans.
Perhaps you mean something different. Maybe you mean "the freedom to engage my Hummer's four-wheel drive and roll over the piles of poor corpses when the floods hit", or "the freedom to get from place to place without engaging the rabble in a non-honking capacity." Sorry, can't help you there.
Why does it make sense to have high speed rail between Paris and London, but not between similarly distant New York and Philadelphia? Why can't we put a loop going from Chicago to Detroit to Cleveland to New York? Or connecting Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville? What about winding from San Diego to San Francisco?
It may not be economical to make links between the coasts, or over much of the Midwest. But the areas I'm talking about are areas with European density, with urban cores at reasonable distances from each other. Believing that the United States as a whole faces "distances that dwarf that of Europe" is downright Texan.
American auto companies were losing sales -- and quickly -- long before the credit crisis. I think this is partly because they were *not* selling what people wanted to buy. They weren't clearing the 'technical hurdles'. Instead, the effort they should have been putting into fuel efficiency were instead squandered on 1) fighting fuel efficiency standards, 2) getting huge classes of larger vehicles exempted from fuel standards, 3) huge ad campaigns to convince Americans that they wanted big, muscular vehicles that got terrible mileage.
In other words, they went to the government and practically begged our legislators not to force them to make changes that would have made their products more desirable to Americans and legal to export. As gas prices inched higher and the public became increasingly aware of global warming, management sat on their butts and pretended that the pendulum would swing back their way.
The SUV is not a product of consumer demand. The SUV is a product of industrial overcapacity. The Big 3 would go broke if they actually sold as much car as people needed. You could probably build a car for $5000 that would serve 80% of people's needs 80% of the time. Car-sharing programs could easily handle the times when people need more car than that. But that would require slimming down an auto industry that is used to selling $20,000-$30,000 behemoths. They don't even make much of an effort with the smaller cars that they *do* sell. It's like they want us to subconsciously associate "small" with "crappy", so they can weasel us all into Hummers.
Whatever you may think of maglev trains, they're not the be all or end all of high-speed rail.
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The feds might also be working under the impression that any profits the university makes off its patents will reduce the tax subsidies that the university needs, thus benefiting the public.
Does it work out that way? Tuition seems to be rising faster as universities get more aggressive about patenting things. It seems to me that, as universities have started trying to act more like for-profit companies, things have been getting worse.
You make sensible points. The only one I can really object to is the first. Sure, 98% of your ideas are going to be crap. But given the state of patent law, a substantial portion of them might be patentable crap.
While there may not be significant risk from having a five minute discussion with your professor over an idea, something more substantial (like a class project) does carry risk. I think that when students believe they have to choose between exploring an idea and being able to profit from the idea, it will wreak merry havoc with the flow of ideas in a university setting. I also think that the free flow of ideas is the absolute most important societal function of a university.
Universities need to be as generous as possible towards their idea monkeys. Otherwise, their most creative and ambitious minds will start hoarding their ideas, and dropping out of the university (probably taking other creative minds with them) in order to maintain ownership.
I always found that the best lectures and discussions were the ones where, having been introduced to a new idea, people started coming up with possible applications for it, or suggesting modifications that might give better results. Okay, most of them were crap, for we were lowly undergrads. But apparently, what we should have been doing, instead of blurting out things like, "Could this technique be used to clean up the audio in sound files?" and having the lecturer explain why that probably wasn't workable, we should have just written a quick "PATENT THIS" next to every dumb idea, then wait until we graduated to find out whether it was a good idea.
Imagine taking this attitude into your university-sponsored research projects. Every time you had a radical insight into why your team's approach wasn't working, you wouldn't send the team an e-mail. You'd document it in your personal files, wait for the project to crash and burn, then follow up after you graduated. Presumably, everyone else would be doing the same.
Then, once you became a professor, rather than telling your students, "Wow, that's an interesting approach, and I strongly encourage you to investigate it," you patiently explain to the student why it's a stupid idea, and he never would have suggested it if he really understood the coursework. If you're worth your professorial stipend, you should be able to come up with enough windbaggery to make it stick, and leave the student demoralized. Then, write a quick "PATENT THIS" in your notes.
If the student continues coming up with good ideas, convince him to drop out and join your idea lab, where you've already got a dozen bright, eager young folks slaving away, coming up with patents and products. It's not as though the Uni has a lot of specialized CS gear that you need to research things properly. You'd arrange your business relationship with these dropouts in whatever way gave it a veneer of legality.
To me, this sorry state of affairs seems like the logical result of a system where students are locked out of the profits generated by their own ideas. The university in this story ought to grant this student a license to his own invention, for $1.
No. The situation is dire enough that failure could mean a collapse of the ecological underpinnings of our civilization, and a commensurate reduction in the ability of the planet to keep us in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. Throwing away all but the cheapest options is akin to asking, "Isn't that a much to be paying for lifeboats?" while the ship is going down!
If our goal is to maximize the future value of our economy, and there is a potential threat out there that could diminish that future value by, say, 50%*, it's worth committing a huge fraction of our wealth to averting it, even if the threat is an uncertain one. Quibbling over a couple of percent today is lunacy.
* That's more akin to a severe depression, not the OMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE (which I haven't ruled out). If you consider civilizational collapse a real possibility, then you have to spend as though the entire future output of the economy is at stake.
1) We *are* smarter.
2) I mean, we at least know not to release more kudzu. That's gotta count for something.
3) You clearly haven't read up on "global warming in its wildest forms." Read "Under a Green Sky." Or just its Amazon reviews, if you're busy. That should give you the flavor of the true disaster scenarios.
In other words, despite our admitted incompetence, we might still have to do some reckless geoengineering, for the same reason that they test out highly experimental medicines on patients with terminal illnesses.
Please document where these proposals were made by serious climate researchers, rather than by Popular Mechanics. Further document that these were serious proposals, rather than "wouldn't-it-be-cool-ifs" of the space elevator variety.*
Enough of the "Scientists predicted global cooling" myth. Even in the days when this belief was supposedly at its peak, the number of papers predicting warming outpaced the number of papers predicting cooling by 6 to 1. The cooling papers were generally ones that predicted a continued rise in atmospheric soot, not sudden onset ice ages.
In other words, your entire post (and by extension, your entire understanding of climate change) rests on a fraudulent foundation.
* Space elevator chatter of the 1970s, I mean. Not the real, legitimate space elevators that we're sure they'll be putting up any day now and it would cost less than a month in Iraq and here's a link to another breakthrough in carbon nanotube production. I'm really not looking to argue over that.
If the point of the Orbital Carbon Observer was to discover what you seem to think it's trying to discover, it would be a complete waste of money. We already know that the sources you want to verify are the cause of increased atmospheric CO2. We know this because we know that the carbon isotope ratio is very different when you compare carbon from the ground to carbon actively involved in the carbon cycle. As we take carbon from the ground and put it into the atmosphere, the ratio of C-14 is lowered, and in about the amounts we would expect.
The excess carbon from the atmosphere came from hydrocarbons in the ground. There isn't much room for honest disagreement on that.
The Observer is less interested in where the CO2 is coming from. That's a solved problem. We want to know where it's going. Specifically, we want to know why the hell we can pump eight gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, and the atmospheric concentrations respond as though we only pumped out six gigatons. We need to know where those extra two gigatons are going, primarily because we need to know how long the biosphere will keep taking up our slack. If this beneficial behavior drops off too fast and too soon, it will lead to greatly accelerated global warming.
While you may not be able to conserve your way to prosperity, you can certainly spend spend spend your way to the poorhouse. Which is exactly what we've been doing with all the natural resources that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution. We're burning through them at a prodigious rate, and only now are we starting to think about how we'll replace that income stream once it's gone. If you're looking for threats to your kids' futures, there's the place to start.
Your fear of conservation seems to be predicated upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the world. It isn't CO2 emissions -- or even energy consumption -- that makes people happy and prosperous. It's what that CO2 and energy are expended in pursuit of that matters. Our fuel efficiency standards (weak and unambitious as they are) haven't just reduced the amount of CO2 we've released, they've also added hundreds of billions of dollars to our economy every single year, because they reduced our demand for oil by billions of barrels each year. Conservation can be great for the economy. This is so true, that some studies have estimated that, if we take all the CO2 reductions that pay out money, and use those gains to pay for the CO2 reductions that lose money, we could meet ambitious targets without net expenditures.
Lastly, given the alternatives you propose, I don't think you're really grasping the notion of cap-and-trade or carbon tax systems. You're proposing that we have government make big, sloppy, error-prone decisions, like adding entire countries to the "import less" column, only to take them off a couple of years later. With a carbon tax, the amount of carbon embodied in any given good or service is simply embedded into its sale price. It took X gallons of gas to provide, and the inputs were therefore taxed at X * rate. Anyone who can provide a similar service with less carbon inputs will have a competitive advantage.
But I like cap-and-trade better. Let the market stumble onto the cheapest, most desirable way to wring unnecessary carbon out of the system. Right now, the market is almost entirely blind to CO2 emissions, to our great detriment. When we implemented the same sort of system for sulfur dioxide, industry claimed that the auction prices would bankrupt them. They swore to Congress that it would cost hundreds of dollars to remove a ton of the stuff from the atmosphere. But when they were overruled, and SO2 permits were auctioned, the actual price turned out to be around $15/ton. Most of the potential buyers found that, even at that low price, it was cheaper to just install scrubbers. The regulation found the true price of SO2 almost immediately, and found that it was cheap. Trading CO2 in a similar manner will show us how much it really costs to red
I think you're missing the point. Ten years ago, taking this sort of survey would likely have resulted in a 10 to 1 landslide for "Huh? You're joking, right?"
I was going to write a longish post detailing why 1) fast change itself is bad, and 2) slowing down the rate at which we alter the climate is hardly a matter of privileging or idealizing any given prior state.
Then I noticed that I was responding to you. So forget I said any of that, so I can leave you with these two words of wisdom.
BEGONE, TROLL!
Re: Ice. Yeah, so the melting isn't a perfectly smooth downward trend. In 2008, the minimum ice coverage for the melting season was 4.67M square kilometers, and the year before, it was 4.28M. That doesn't negate the overall trend. In actuality, the next lowest year wasn't 2006, but 2005. In 2006, there was a slight recovery as well.
It's pretty dishonest for sites like NewsBusters and FreeRepublic to be trumpeting a half-million km^2 gain, without pointing out the previous year saw a loss of about 1.2M km^2. They also forgot to mention that the ice-shrinking trend has been statistically significant over the past fifty years of fluctuating year-over-year levels. They also won't tell you that the people who produced the data think that ice volume (as opposed to ice area) is down from last year.
One. Year. Means. Jack.
That goes double for "global warming peaked in 1998." Look at the graph, and notice a couple of things. First, notice that 1998 was a really, really, really weird year. I defy you to find another year on the graph as far above the five year average (though a couple from the 1880s are in the running). 1998 was an El Nino-injected monster of a year, and it's utterly dishonest for anyone to use it as a baseline.
The next thing to note: the sheer amount of noise in the graph. Even the five year averages are full of dips and surges. The progression is anything but steady, yet the overall trend is clear. Individual years? They're all over the map. The record is littered with unusually low years that, in the end, didn't amount to anything significant.
The last thing to note: Even accounting for the fact that 1998 is pulling up the five year average towards the end of the blue line, every single year from 2001 on matched or exceeded that five year average. 2008 isn't on the chart yet, and when it is, it will be somewhat below the average for this decade. But climate scientists aren't sweating.*
Re: computer models. I don't know what you're talking about, and I'm starting to suspect that you don't either.
Watching climate contrarians spin is like watching a compulsive gambler. Sure, you made $1800 that last hand, but if you were thinking clearly you'd notice that you were still down twenty grand for the night. Don't let one offbeat year fool you. The averages are what matter.
* They mention that this year did include a La Nina event, which tends to drop temperatures.
I've had good experiences so far in the non-profit sector. It really is all about community building, and all the nifty gadgetry out there has huge potential. Unfortunately, the nonprofits I've seen are constrained by limited technology. My workplace mostly uses ancient Mac G3s because, way back in the day, somebody donated a bunch of G3s to our parent organization. We've been a Mac shop ever since.
The point is, the non-profit sector has its ups and downs. The downside is, you'll probably be the most techy person in the organization, so there's nobody to teach you the ropes or bail you out when things go wrong. But you also have a freedom of action that wouldn't be possible as a junior coder sharing six million lines of code with seventy other developers, sixty-nine of whom have tenure over you.
Let me reiterate davecrusoe's point: There are lots of organizations that are starved for CS talent, who can't always pay industry average, but will just about let you write your own job description. I like it much better than being just another henchman.
>> I've been interviewing candidates for the last 15 years and "computer science" is a joke. The universities are teaching a trade, not a science.
>> Kids barely understand the mathematical basics of how a hash table works.
Yeah, I never got this. My professor kept trying to explain it using this short order cook metaphor, and I spent the whole lecture thinking about hash browns. If I'd only known to eat my sandwich before class, I might be qualified to work at your company.
>> Don't even get me started on twos-compliment arithmetic
Two, you are lookin' fine tonight! Your serifs really highlight your kerning. And that perfume... Helvetica? Naughty!
>> or how to evaluate algorithms.
The proper way to evaluate an algorithm is to put a description of it up on your blog and see how many diggs it gets.
The more computationally intensive alternative is to put it on Wikipedia, check back in a week, and implement the result. Unfortunately that approach runs O(n * log(m) * 2^q)*, and is therefore to be avoided.
* n - length of the description, m - number of edits, q - how many degrees of separation there are between you and Jimbo Wales.
So, you couldn't think of anything either?
I don't know. If I had a brilliant idea, that would lead to a revolutionary product, then I told Google about it and they made millions and I got nothing, I'd be a bit hurt.
On the other hand, I'd get to use that nifty product that I'd been dreaming of. Admit it, that would be pretty nifty.
Where are you getting your statistics?
Adjusted for inflation, the cost of WWII was about 5 trillion dollars.
The Iraq war has already cost nearly 600B, with some estimates of the eventual costs being upwards of 3 trillion.
The best estimate I've found of bailout spending claims that 2.7T has been spent. But that does include a lot of collateralized loans, equity stake purchases, etc., so the taxpayers may be able to recoup quite a bit of it.
I'm not convinced that the bailout is being handled properly, or that it's having the positive effect that it's supposed to. But I don't see how any of this constitutes "demand side economics." Not even the $168B in economic stimulus, which mostly got given to the wealthy and middle class, and then went to paying off existing debt, not increase consumer demand.
Had there been a real increase in private spending, it would have eased our economic troubles some. I think it's okay to give public spending a shot. At least that way, we know that it will lead to new demand.
Keynesian economics worked well in WWII*. Trillions of dollars in artificial demand, mostly spent on things which had little or no post-war use (as opposed to good infrastructure spending), and the deaths of over 400,000 of our future workforce, and somehow all that waste led to impressive post-war prosperity.
Imagine if the same sort of heroic spending was undertaken in the pursuit of new infrastructure, health and education initiatives, ecological restoration, alternative energy research, and the like. That is, spending on things that will provide for our needs in the future, rather than munitions**.
* It hadn't been properly tried during the Great Depression, though even the limited attempts by the New Deal met with success, until 1938 when Roosevelt listened to detractors, cut spending to reduce the deficit, and crashed the economy for a while.
** As someone wittier than me explained, bombs are economically strange things. Rather than producing goods and services, they destroy what is already made. Worse, they are delivered at no small expense to people who do not want them.
I'll see your sig, and raise you a "then you're a hypocritical bastard":
You claim that nobody lives for you. Tell that to the guy who made way less than minimum wage picking the fruit you eat, or the woman who cleans your office, or the guy who bags your groceries, or the sweatshop worker who made your shirt. Each of them makes a tiny contribution to your own happiness, success, and comfort, and each is rewarded with a lifestyle that ranges from boring and degrading to borderline slavery. You take their contributions without hesitation or thought, while whining and sniveling about how unfair it is that you should be asked to give back in a small measure.
If that isn't asking somebody else to live for you, then what is?
It's very lazy or stupid of you to assume that the poor are poor because they are lazy or stupid.
It's also lazy or stupid of you to attribute these fishy statistics to the New York Times. What you linked to was actually a book excerpt that the Times merely reprinted. They would be more appropriately attributed thusly: According to "The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of American's Wealthy" authors Thomas J. Stanley, Ph.D and William D. Danko Ph.D...
But two random doctorates who wrote a book congratulating millionaires for being millionaires just doesn't have the same ring of progressive credibility as "according to the New York Times," does it?
Regardless of the statistics you cite (which are cherry-picked, and may or may not be properly collected), it doesn't change the fact that sociologists cannot find a better predictor of a person's socioeconomic future than their parents' socioeconomic background. It's a stronger predictor than race, gender, IQ, or scholastic achievement (individual or parental).
It's also true that the highest performing children of poor people graduate from college at approximately the same rate as the lowest-performing children of the wealthy. I don't remember exactly how the statistics broke down, but it was something like being in the most talented 20% of all children in the lowest income quartile gave you about the same graduation rate as being in the least talented 20% of children in the highest income quartile.
Being the idiot child of a rich person is a more secure route to success than being a bright and talented child of a poor person. In such a society, chalking your own success up to hard work and everyone else's failures up to stupidity is a cruel and narcissistic sort of stupidity.
That first sentence was supposed to be "The weight of a flywheel is far less important than the rotation speed."
The weight of a flywheel is far less important than the weight. Energy of motion is a product of mass times velocity squared, so doubling the rate of rotation quadruples the amount of energy stored. The ideal for many applications is to find a material that is very light, but won't fly apart at high speeds. I remember reading about somebody trying something with carbon nanofibers, but that was a long while back.
The weight doesn't matter much for energy seepage either. A good flywheel will be suspended by magnets, so regardless of the weight, the friction due to weight is effectively zero. There is still air friction and electrical losses to deal with.
Getting energy into them isn't a huge obstacle either. I've scoured the web, and it looks like the people actually selling flywheels-as-UPS solutions are claiming 90% efficiency.
Something may be missing in my understanding here. The article claims that the battery backup for the wind farm costs about three million dollars per MWH, whereas the flywheel backup system I'm looking at right now claims that it can give you about 200kWH capacity for about $50,000. That's $250k per MWH installed, and very low maintenance costs.
Their claims could be overblown, or I could have my math wrong, or there is something I'm missing that makes the flywheels unsuitable for this application. There might also be a huge economic opportunity, but somehow I doubt it.
I did some calculations (yay!), and came up with the following: Raising the Empire State Building (365,000 tons of material) to the height of one meter would store a little shy of a megawatt hour of energy.
I'm imagining this weird future city where the buildings slowly rose and fell as energy was stored and withdrawn. It's a cool thought, but it seems that the engineering difficulties would be considerable, and the payoff not so much.
A system where water was stored at the top of a skyscraper might be more feasible (putting the weight a hundred times higher means you only need 1% of the material. You might be able to do something with water, or a block on a chain. But the storage payoff seems relatively small.
It might make more sense to deal with material that's already being lifted up and dropped down. Like integrating some sort of storage and release system for the water already being pumped to the top of skyscrapers. Given separate reservoirs for potable water and sewage, and some leeway about when to pump water in and release waste out, something might be arranged.
The calculation: 365000 tons * 907 kg/ton * 10 joules/kg * 1kWH / 3,600,000 joules. The 365000 tons figure is from this kid's site.
By the same reasoning, if it had been in Countrywide's best interests to have tighter mortgage standards, they would have implemented them on their own. If it had been in Morgan Stanley's best interest to investigate what they were really buying with those credit default swap dollars, then they would have. No need for the government to demand transparency. The private markets will demand exactly as much transparency as they need.
We saw how those worked out.
We saw how something else worked out as well. The last time we dared demand higher fuel efficiency from the automakers, they promised carnage on the highways and blood on their balance sheets. In fact, they adjusted to the regulations with minimal disruption, regulations which save the broader economy about $100B a year in reduced fuel demand.
We could bail out the auto industry a thousand times over for that kind of cash.
If you want to judge vehicles by their maximum occupancy, rather than by the number of people they ordinarily carry. I don't see any problem with that. Makes perfect sense. Also, we should put every driver behind the wheel of a schoolbus. Our dependency on foreign oil will melt away.
If you're going to trot out this right-wing shtick, could you at least trot out higher-quality right-wing shtick?
WTF? ::scratches head::
Regarding your first paragraph: Did you know?
1) China already has higher mileage standards than the American fleet will by 2020?
2) By 2010, Japan will have higher mileage standards than the American fleet will by 2020?
3) By 2012, the EU will have efficiency standards 12MPG higher than American cars?
Even if America were to eliminate fuel standards, it wouldn't change the standards they would have to uphold in order to sell to foreign markets. Plus, foreign car makers selling here have to uphold our standards or better.
Interesting that you, "as an engineer", think that government meddling is the whole of Detroit's problems, but when listing specific legislation you could only come up with one, which applies equally to Detroit's competitors, and where the imposed standards are actually lower than those imposed by most other markets on their own fleets.
It's also interesting that you "as an engineer" think that it's easier to relocate oil production than auto manufacturing. Maybe we would be better off if the oil industry snuck off, and took Texas and Alaska with them.
1) Which is better for the economy: government spending that keeps people gainfully employed, at the expense of a small amount of incentive for those who already can afford to never work another day in their lives? Or letting tens of millions of people stand idle?
Really? Wow. I didn't think you'd pick that one.
2) "Where the commuter wants to go" is mostly a product of local government decisions. They make the fundamental decisions about how land is zoned. Arguably, rail works so poorly in the U.S. in part due to planning boards that bought into the 'everyone has a car' conventional wisdom.
3) Short of smuggling a nuke onto the train, I don't see how terrorists could engineer anything like another September 11. They would be hard pressed to kill a majority of the passengers.
5) See 2. Rail has the same problem as roads in this regard. You slap down the line, expecting it to last decades, without being sure that it's in the right place. On the other hand, once a road is laid down, people start using it, and destinations start cropping up to take advantage of the traffic, in a self-perpetuating cycle.
6) Americans want the freedom to go where they want, in a convenient manner. You'd be hard-pressed to say that this desire is uniquely American, or that it's a feeling not shared by transit-taking Europeans.
Perhaps you mean something different. Maybe you mean "the freedom to engage my Hummer's four-wheel drive and roll over the piles of poor corpses when the floods hit", or "the freedom to get from place to place without engaging the rabble in a non-honking capacity." Sorry, can't help you there.
Why does it make sense to have high speed rail between Paris and London, but not between similarly distant New York and Philadelphia? Why can't we put a loop going from Chicago to Detroit to Cleveland to New York? Or connecting Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville? What about winding from San Diego to San Francisco?
It may not be economical to make links between the coasts, or over much of the Midwest. But the areas I'm talking about are areas with European density, with urban cores at reasonable distances from each other. Believing that the United States as a whole faces "distances that dwarf that of Europe" is downright Texan.
American auto companies were losing sales -- and quickly -- long before the credit crisis. I think this is partly because they were *not* selling what people wanted to buy. They weren't clearing the 'technical hurdles'. Instead, the effort they should have been putting into fuel efficiency were instead squandered on 1) fighting fuel efficiency standards, 2) getting huge classes of larger vehicles exempted from fuel standards, 3) huge ad campaigns to convince Americans that they wanted big, muscular vehicles that got terrible mileage.
In other words, they went to the government and practically begged our legislators not to force them to make changes that would have made their products more desirable to Americans and legal to export. As gas prices inched higher and the public became increasingly aware of global warming, management sat on their butts and pretended that the pendulum would swing back their way.
The SUV is not a product of consumer demand. The SUV is a product of industrial overcapacity. The Big 3 would go broke if they actually sold as much car as people needed. You could probably build a car for $5000 that would serve 80% of people's needs 80% of the time. Car-sharing programs could easily handle the times when people need more car than that. But that would require slimming down an auto industry that is used to selling $20,000-$30,000 behemoths. They don't even make much of an effort with the smaller cars that they *do* sell. It's like they want us to subconsciously associate "small" with "crappy", so they can weasel us all into Hummers.
Whatever you may think of maglev trains, they're not the be all or end all of high-speed rail.